AP

Mark Zuckerberg, not talking to his Facebook app ... yet.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave out some dramatic news on his Q3 earnings call with analysts yesterday afternoon: Facebook has a new Artificial Intelligence unit and, separately, the company is working on a new speech recognition product.

(That news was largely overshadowed by the revelation that for the first time the company had seen a slight decline in usage by U.S. teens.)

It's not clear how the AI and speech projects are linked. But traditionally, the "Turing test" for artificial intelligence is how well a machine responds to a conversation, so it would not unexpected for the two projects to be developed in tandem. Also, Zuckerberg talked about them one after the other on the call.

In almost the same breath, Zuckerberg talked about Facebook's search developments, "Post Search" and "Graph Search." He noted that Facebook now has an index of 1.2 trillion Facebook posts, and they are all searchable. He inferred that, somehow, the AI product would be driven by the post index:

In the last quarter, we started testing what we call host search allows you to search all the unstructured text and posts that people have ever made on Facebook. About 1.2 trillion more posts. The folks on the team who have worked on web search engines in the past tell me that the Graph Search corpus is bigger than any other web search index out there. It's still early for Graph Search, because it's still in beta, only in English and we haven't launched our mobile version yet, but it's something I am really excited about.

So that's the context. A little later, Zuckerberg discussed the launch of the AI project:

In September, we formed the Facebook AI Group to do world-class artificial intelligence research using all the knowledge that people have shared on Facebook. The goal here is to use new approaches in AI to help make sense of all the content that people share so we can generate new insights about the world to answer people's questions.

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Facebook Has A New Artificial Intelligence Unit And Is Working On Speech Recognition